Message Nine

To Be Sanctified Wholly
with Our Spirit, Soul, and Body Preserved Complete

Scripture Reading: 1 Thes. 5:12-24

1. God not only has made us holy in position by the redeeming blood of Christ to separate us unto Himself in His judicial redemption but also is sanctifying us in disposition by His own holy nature to saturate us with Himself in His organic salvation—Heb. 13:12; 10:29; Rom. 6:19, 22; Eph. 5:26:
   1. God’s dispositional sanctification of our spirit, soul, and body is to “sonize” us divinely, making us sons of God that we may become the same as God in His life and in His nature but not in His Godhead so that we can be God’s expression—1:4-5; Heb. 2:10-11.
   2. By sanctifying us, God transforms us in the essence of our spirit, soul, and body, making us wholly like Him in nature; in this way He preserves our spirit, soul, and body wholly complete—1 Thes. 5:23.
2. God not only sanctifies us wholly but also preserves our spirit, soul, and body complete:
   1. Quantitatively, God sanctifies us wholly; qualitatively, God preserves us complete; that is, He keeps our spirit, soul, and body perfect.
   2. Although God preserves us, we need to take the responsibility, the initiative, to cooperate with His operation to be preserved by keeping our spirit, soul, and body in the saturating of the Holy Spirit—vv. 12-24.
3. In order to cooperate with God to preserve our spirit in sanctification, we must keep our spirit in a living condition by exercising our spirit:
   1. In order to preserve our spirit, we must keep our spirit living by exercising it to have fellowship with God; if we fail to exercise our spirit in this way, we will leave it in a deadened situation:
      1. To rejoice, pray, and give thanks are to exercise our spirit; to preserve our spirit is first of all to exercise our spirit to keep our spirit living and to pull it out of death—vv. 16-18.
      2. We need to cooperate with the sanctifying God to be separated from a spirit-deadening situation—cf. Num. 6:6-8; 2 Cor. 5:4.
      3. We must worship God, serve God, and fellowship with God in and with our spirit; whatever we are, whatever we have, and whatever we do toward God must be in our spirit—John 4:24; Rom. 1:9; Phil. 2:1.
   2. In order to preserve our spirit, we need to keep it from all defilement and contamination—2 Cor. 7:1.
   3. In order to preserve our spirit, we must exercise ourselves to have a conscience without offense toward God and men—Acts 24:16; Rom. 9:1; cf. 8:16.
   4. In order to preserve our spirit, we must take heed to our spirit, setting our mind on our spirit and caring for the rest in our spirit—Mal. 2:15-16; Rom. 8:6; 2 Cor. 2:13.
4. In order to cooperate with God to preserve our soul in sanctification, we must clear the three main “arteries” of our psychological heart, the parts of our soul—our mind, emotion, and will:
   1. In order for our soul to be sanctified, our mind must be renewed to be the mind of Christ (Rom. 12:2), our emotion must be touched and saturated with the love of Christ (Eph. 3:17, 19), our will must be subdued by and infused with the resurrected Christ (Phil. 2:13; cf. S. S. 4:4a; 7:4a), and we must love the Lord with our whole being (Mark 12:30).
   2. The way to unclog the three main arteries of our psychological heart is to make a thorough confession to the Lord; we need to stay with the Lord for a period of time, asking Him to bring us fully into the light, and in the light of what He exposes, we need to confess our defects, failures, defeats, mistakes, wrongdoings, and sins—1 John 1:5-9:
      1. In order to unclog the artery of our mind, we need to confess everything that is sinful in our thoughts and in our way of thinking.
      2. In order to unclog the artery of our will, we need to confess the germs of rebellion in our will.
      3. In order to unclog the artery of our emotion, we need to confess the natural and even fleshy way that we express our joy and sorrow and also that, in many cases, we hate what we should love and we love what we should hate.
      4. If we take the time necessary to unclog the three main arteries of our psychological heart, we will have the sense that our entire being has become living and is in a very healthy condition.
5. In order to cooperate with God to preserve our body in sanctification, we must present our body to Him so that we may live a holy life for the church life, practicing the Body life in order to carry out God’s perfect will—Rom. 12:1-2; 1 Thes. 4:4; 5:18:
   1. Our fallen body, the flesh, is the “meeting hall” of Satan, sin, and death, but by Christ’s redemption and in our regenerated spirit as the “meeting hall” of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, our body is a member of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit—Rom. 6:6, 12, 14; 7:11, 24; 1 Cor. 6:15, 19.
   2. To preserve our body is to glorify God in our body—v. 20.
   3. To preserve our body is to magnify Christ in our body—Phil. 1:20.
   4. To preserve our body, we must not live according to our soul, the old man; then the body of sin will lose its job and become unemployed—Rom. 6:6.
   5. To preserve our body, we must not present our body to anything that is sinful but instead present ourselves as slaves to righteousness and our members as weapons of righteousness—vv. 13, 18-19, 22:
      1. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from fornication; that each one of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor”—1 Thes. 4:3-4.
      2. That they do not know God is the basic reason that people indulge in the passion of lust—v. 5.
   6. To preserve our body, we must buffet it and lead it as a slave to fulfill our holy purpose to become the holy city—1 Cor. 9:27; Rev. 21:2.